In that sense—and given the talk of “real” American-ness that persists today—Mattson’s excellent book is a timely companion...
A cocker spaniel and a plain cloth coat become emblems of the paranoid-style right-wing politics of the 1950s, courtesy of one Richard Milhous Nixon.
The time is 1952. As Mattson (History/Ohio Univ.; "What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?": Jimmy Carter, America's "Malaise," and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country, 2009, etc.) opens his narrative, Nixon is pitching a fit: “Goddamn bastards want me out. They want to sack my political career. They don’t have much on me, but they’ll use what they have. That’s how they play, those sluggers and smear boys in the liberal press.” What they had was slender evidence that Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, had been handed some thousands of dollars to help his cause. Nixon’s defense was the famous “Checkers speech,” which forms the centerpiece of Mattson’s account. But rather than take Nixon’s strained words about his frugality and Pat’s wifely virtues at face value, Mattson neatly deconstructs the speech, which “started off a bit rough” but developed into a work of “political genius,” showing how Nixon used it to set the notion of himself as a plain man in a land of plain men in a time when claims of heroism were all around—thus distinguishing himself not just from opponent Adlai Stevenson, that famed egghead, but also from Eisenhower himself, chief general during a war in which Nixon was middle management in the Pacific. “The speech,” writes Mattson, “saved Nixon’s career by making him into a man of the people, a ‘real’ American—a term that rang throughout the letters and telegrams that poured in for him.” By implication, Stevenson and even Eisenhower weren’t real Americans, thus helping establish the kind of lowest-common-denominator politics that has held sway ever since.
In that sense—and given the talk of “real” American-ness that persists today—Mattson’s excellent book is a timely companion to the current election season. The question is: Who’s playing Nixon?Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-812-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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